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Spinmaster Karl Rove At It Again…

July 31, 2009

President George Bush comforts Karl Rove on the day he was forced to resign from the White House in August, 2007.

by Glynn Wilson

The master of spin from the Bush years, Karl Rove, is at it again, even as he testified before the House Judiciary Committee for the second time Thursday about his role in manipulating America’s judicial system from his office in the West Wing of the White House.

While the transcript of Rove’s testimony might be released in August and the committee may hold a public hearing on White House involvement in the political firing of U.S. attorneys and other executive branch intrusions into the judicial branch, including the prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman, Rove had already granted interviews with the New York Times and Washington Post to spin the story his way in what may constitute an act of obstruction of justice. Rove even selectively released a few e-mail messages to the papers to bolster his case, although what was reported seems to indicate he was just as involved as we have been reporting for the past two years.

Here’s how the Washington Post played the story.

Political adviser Karl Rove and other high-ranking figures in the Bush White House played a greater role than previously understood in the firing of federal prosecutors almost three years ago, according to e-mails obtained by The Washington Post, in a scandal that led to mass Justice Department resignations and an ongoing criminal probe.

In the exclusive interviews Rove granted to the Post and the Times earlier this month, Rove described himself as a “conduit” of grievances from lawmakers and others about the performance of certain prosecutors.

“The e-mails and interview were provided on the condition that they not be released until Rove’s House testimony concluded,” according to the Post.

Rove said he did not recall several events because of his “busy job” and asserted that he had done nothing to influence criminal cases, “an allegation by Democrats that has dogged him for years,” the Post reports, even though the Post has not been the lead news organization investigating Rove.

The Post allows itself to be used by Rove and his attorney Robert Luskin, who asserts that “there was never any point where Karl was trying to get a particular prosecution advanced or retarded.”

“Yes, I was a recipient of complaints, and I passed them on to the counsel’s office to be passed onto Justice,” Rove told the papers in what appears to be a total distortion of what actually happened. This will most likely come out in the end in either the congressional probe or an ongoing criminal case.

Rove injects a canard about “weak enforcement of voter fraud laws and public corruption,” which he says “had the sound of authenticity to me. If what I’m told is accurate, it’s really troublesome.”

What the two top newspapers in the land don’t seem to realize is that this is an attempt by Rove to not only snake his way out of culpability in politicizing the Justice Department, but to actually try and make it appear as if he gives a damn about the problems he created as Bush’s lead political brain and attack dog. Every single decision made by the Bush administration was filtered through Rove to make sure it met political muster, and the administration aggressively pursued a strategy of taking over the country by the Republican Party. Rove often promised his GOP buddies that his mission was to keep the Republicans in charge of the country “for a generation.”

So why does this come as a surprise to the Post and the Times at this late date?

In the Times version of this fiction, Mr. Rove said he “played only a peripheral role in the removal of the prosecutors.”

Right…

A statement from the Judiciary Committee on Thursday suggested that Mr. Rove might not have fully described his role in the firing of U.S. attorneys in the earlier interviews with the papers.

But we learn from the Times version of the story that Mr. Rove “provided a selection of office e-mail messages about the issue.”

“It’s hardly surprising that Mr. Rove would minimize his involvement in the U.S. attorney firings or that selectively leaked documents would serve his version of events,” the statement says. “The Judiciary Committee intends to honor its agreement to maintain the confidentiality of this process until its work is complete. While not describing the contents of the documents or interviews, the committee believes that the full record will show Mr. Rove’s role in the firing of the U.S. attorneys was more substantial than his statements to the media indicate.”

But as one of the e-mails reported by the Times shows, Rove was obviously heavily involved.

“Give me a report on what U.S. attorneys slots are vacant or expected to be open soon,” he wrote to his deputy, J. Scott Jennings, in a late evening e-mail message on Nov. 25, 2006. Mr. Jennings replied with a curt, “Yes, sir.”

Nah, he wasn’t involved…

Reacting to the news, the key whistle-blower in the case against Rove for his involvement in the Siegelman prosecution, Alabama attorney Jill Simpson, said this morning that Rove breached his agreement with the committee by leaking information to the papers, just as her testimony was leaked after she testified last fall.

“He and Rep. Lamar Smith breached my agreement also with congress by leaking my testimony to Rob Riley,” she said. “I even have an apology letter from Conyer’s for their behavior.”

“Clearly Karl cannot honor any agreement even with Congress and the White House,” she said. “I think it is important that he has obstructed justice now for the second time due to his desire to leak and spin in a congressional investigation where he agreed to remain silent. They should charge him with obstruction of justice. Bless his little black heart he just could not help himself.”

The penalty is five years, she said, and he clearly had a written agreement worked out by his lawyer with the White House, Congress and the former president.

“He violated the congressional investigation by talking to the newspapers,” she said. “The statute is clear. See chapter 73 section 1505, the second paragraph. I think we have a bingo.”

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An Important Message

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- It’s been an interesting ride to say the least, like an experimental roller coaster in a new kind of theme park, maybe. But the ground has shifted and it’s time to move on down the MoJo road.

We are launching a brand new news Website under a new name from Washington, D.C. called the New American Journal. You might want to Bookmark that page or subscribe to the new RSS feed now.

This archive will remain up for awhile longer, but most of the action will move to the new site over the next few weeks and months as I make another transition out of my home town of Birmingham, Alabama to a more mobile setup in a Roadtrek camper van that will remain on the move from Washington, D.C. and the mountains of Virginia to the Gulf Coast.

In the spring of 2005, after moving back to Birmingham from Washington, D.C. to be there for my then-79-year-old mother -- who had no business being alone anymore for health and safety reasons -- I covered my last story for The New York Times: The trial of Richard Scrushy of HealthSouth.

But after it became clear that the new management at the Times was marching to the right for economic reasons after the Jayson Blair scandal, and after “the people” re-elected George W. Bush for a second term as president — or perhaps the Republican techie cabal out of Chattanooga stole the election in Ohio, depending on who you believe — I became convinced that a new kind of press was needed in America for democracy to have a chance of survival.

Blogging software was just emerging then as an alternative way to publish on the Web — and as an alternative for readers to the mainstream, corporate news media in the U.S. and around the world.

I studied up on what was out there, then found a programmer in Homewood who was running a server out of a little computer shop, and started chasing the headlines on a new domain, LocustFork.Net. The idea was to practice the kind of watchdog journalism that helped fight and stop a dam on the Locust Fork of the Black Warrior River in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. It started out as a simple html news page, but we soon added a blog archive interface where original stories, columns, photos and videos could easily be published on the Web and archived by date, tag, category and keywords.

I made one more trip to Washington, D.C. in March to do some work for States News Service and The Hollywood Reporter, and while there, launched a new editorial opinion column from a kitchen in Silver Spring, Maryland called Under the Microscope.

Before I knew it or wanted to admit it, however, I found myself back in Birmingham hunkering down to see what would happen in Bush’s second term. It was a stressful time for the world as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan still raged, and it was a stressful time for the country as we woke up every day wondering what fool hardy thing Bush and Cheney would do next. So yes, it was also a stressful time for me as well.

I left my native Birmingham in 1981 for college at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa and only rarely looked back. I did move back to Southside for a brief period in the late 1980s to open a book store, newsstand and coffee bar and launch a free-lance journalism career after becoming disillusioned with the state of newspapers in my home state. But I left again in 1989 for Gulf Shores to get back into the news business full time.

Then in 1993, I moved back to Tuscaloosa to work on a Masters degree and then got out of Alabama for a good long time, my journey taking me to teach in Georgia, Tennessee and then New Orleans. After having a heck of a run as a free-lance journalist from there, in 2004 I made the big move to D.C.

This new kind of news Website was discovered and followed by people all over the country who were appalled at the politicization of the legal system in America.

I continued to work on building the economy for this new Web Press and started getting enough traffic to actually receive pay checks from Google ads and then Blog ads. People began to send in donations in lieu of a subscription price through PayPal.

By the time of president Barack Obama’s historic election in 2008, and then when the BP oil spill hit in the spring of 2010, thousands of people — even in Alabama — were getting online and starting to follow the news on Facebook and then Twitter. We ramped up the readership and the funding to pay for the journalism to a whole new level with the help of a few trial lawyers, labor unions and environmental groups.

By the time President Obama was reelected in 2012, we had completed a redesign that finally merged the news and blog functions into one interface. Our monthly readership hit 3.2 million in October, in part because I was about the only public opinion analyst in the country willing to predict that Obama would walk away with that election in a landslide. Pretty much everybody else, including AP, the Washington Post, all the talking head pundits on TeeVee and even the New York Times kept saying that the election was going to be “too close to call.” I knew better.

As the weeks and months went by, however, and my now 87-year-old mother’s condition continued to deteriorate, I knew it was about time to start planning a new transition for my family and for my future as a Web publisher and journalist.

Ever since I made that first move to Washington in 2004, I have known deep down that the real action in American politics and journalism takes place in the nation’s capital city. It is hard to make a career or a difference out of just focusing on what happens in state capitals like Montgomery or Baton Rouge. The big action and the big news happens in Washington, no matter what they try to tell you in Alabama’s capital city, where they still insist on bucking the fedral govmt every chance they get.

What the federal government does is just far more important than what happens in the states. Besides, the people and the politicians in states — especially Old South states like Alabama — remain far behind the times when it comes to public opinion, forming public policy and keeping up with the news online. Everybody in New York, D.C. and on the West Coast long ago moved on past reading print newspapers and getting all their news from the Boob Tube.

I mean I stopped reading newspapers in print in 1995 and have since sworn off most news coverage on television, national and local. It is all a money-making sensational game for national news outlets, where the partisan divide so dominates the discussion that we will never move past it as a country until so many people stop watching it that they have to change their ways. CNN is already considering converting itself into a cheap reality show. If that is what you think we need feel free to change the channel.

On the local level, the softball local, local, local philosophy on the news will never generate enough traffic to form a full economy of scale, with the possible exception of Newhouse news outlets like al.com, where the resources of the old newspaper and television news empires still provide the budget to create a virtual monopoly on what people consider to be news. Many, many people are now seeing that as a bad thing and have turned to alternative news outlets like this one for a more informed perspective on what goes on in the world.

But a huge swath of the mass audience will continue to depend on broadcast news outlets to read the news generated by print outlets to them on television for the foreseeable future. High Definition television is a powerful medium of communication and is so addictive with the all the entertainment options for sedentary viewers to sit in their recliners and soak it all up with their eyes, without have to exert themselves to do anything but change the channel now and then.

Those who are turning to the Web are a more educated, higher-end demographic audience who are burned out on the old news they get late from newspapers and the passive nature of television. They want to be more engaged in the entertainment and the news process. They make comments and share headline links on Facebook and Twitter, and they are more apt to be politically involved and donate to worthy causes and do more than just show up on election day to vote for their same old party hacks.

These are the people who we are interested in reaching. They are the ones who will change the world for the better. If you have read this far, that means you.

I truly and sincerely appreciate all the support we’ve received from readers all over the state and the country over the past few years. I hope you will continue to follow us on this journey into a brave new world.

Please continue to follow and support our efforts as we create the next new evolution in this new, new, watchdog journalism, what I like to call the alternative, independent Web Press. We really are creating something entirely new here. The technology inevitably changes the way we report and write.

See you down the road from the New American Journal. Don’t forget to like, comment, share -- and maybe even make a donation when you can. Reader contributions are still going to be critical even as we seek out new national sponsors to truly build the economy for this new journalism, to sustain this critical work into what I hope will be a bright, successful future for American democracy.

I has to be so. Any other attitude would inevitably result in failure. I'm not ready to give up. Are you?

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